Shepherds of Stars
by MiddayFiddler
Summary: Sometimes you told me you wanted me to keep for yourself. I reminded you that you already owned the sheets, the chambers, the palace, the grace of one of the mightiest, and whole world. You told me the world was not enough.


A/N: This originally started as an attempt to write fluffy, happy, slightly dramatic JuKou. Five months later, I have no explanation for this whatsoever, except my love for messed-up relationships and non-linear storytelling.

* * *

There is no sky anymore. No Moon. No stars. Just omnipresent darkness.

You are holding me gently, as if the world hasn't just turned on itself in painful agony.

My only thought is that the black rukh is fitting us far too well.

* * *

The audience was taking too long.

The air in the Throne Hall was stale, sultry, suffocating. Procession of deputies, ambassadors and second or third sons of rulers of the neighbouring countries with their wives was standing silently in an unmoving line, reeking of exhaustion and sweat and period blood. Heavy fragrance of incense was finishing the mosaic of human imperfection. It was meant to cover the smell of decay coming from a body soon to be carried in on the golden hearse, but I could feel the burn of vomit in my throat.

The last mockery of the late Emperor was to die in summer.

The belt of my ceremonial robes was cutting painfully into my ribs. Fourteen layers of thick, raw white linen, one for each year of my life, were chafing soft skin on my breasts and hips. A drop of sweat fell from under my fringe. It ran down my cheek, my neck and disappeared under the hem of dress. I felt its trace down my torso and could no nothing, nothing at all, because the way the robes were sewn disabled my arms from making a slightest movement.

I knew nothing about being an Emperor. I didn't know it was supposed to be so uncomfortable. That it was supposed to hurt.

I greeted the deputy of another gods-forsaken province. Copper coins on their clothes were clinking pleasantly and I knew I would forget all about them.

Aladdin was sitting by my side, the ceremonial headpiece falling down his hair. I thought he was sleeping. The heads of golden lions on the armrests of my throne were scalding, burning the folds of their manes into my soft palms.

You knew. You told me the two of us were reminding you of children that sneaked into their father's study to play the game of kings and princesses.

The clatter of two pairs of sandals was echoing on the marble floor.

The deputy of Kingdom of Sindria, you were introduced and I promptly forgot the name. All the kingdoms were so far away and similar to each other like crows' eggs in the nest in the crown of the peach tree. I remembered the attire, because I envied it. Soft cotton, scandalous amount of uncovered skin, drops of sweat caught on golden jewellery embracing your wrists and necks. I should have thought of other things back then. Countries I should have been memorizing, countries I would never had a chance of discovering, had I not met Aladdin years ago in the royal gardens, countries that had princes and counts and governors and one of them was to become my husband.

"My beautiful princess."

The King of Sindria was young and careless, with hair longer than mine and a posture of a man fully convinced about his oncoming ascension among gods and earthly immortality at the same time. Brother Kouen's face twisted into sour grimace.

"My kingdom bows before all your golden glory and sends its regards."

The Magi of Sindria was looking at me intently. His stare was sharp and unpleasant, as if I was a terracotta statue that came out with crooked torso and he thought it interesting in its incorrigible imperfection. Or maybe not, but that was how I came to feel in days before the funeral.

I didn't like the stare at all.

Aladdin's fingers clutched the fabric over my shoulder-blade. I couldn't turn my head to see what caused it. I felt the remnants of his warm, shaky breath on my cheek, and thought it to be a heat fever.

"Enough of embarrassing yourself, Sinbad." The other Magi was not even attempting to disguise the annoyance in his voice. I saw Kouen stepping out of the line before the Royal Mother put him back in line with one swift movement of her hand. Brother Kouha was nodding enthusiastically by his side, unaware of his scandalous inappropriateness.

The Magi's eyes were still fixed on me. There was something scary in his gaze, something eerily similar to Aladdin's eyes in the flickering light of oil lamp slowly dying out in the midst of the night. I used to be afraid of him in those moments – it seemed like I would be devoured if I came closer, turned into a void in a shape of human. I wanted to turn my head away. I wanted to hide. I felt naked even through the fourteen layers of linen.

"It smells here so much I'm gonna puke," the Magi said. I felt the bile rise in my throat just from hearing him say what everyone else was just thinking. His king laughed with a hint of nervousness and patted him on a shoulder.

"Let's go play somewhere. I don't think this dolly here cares much about our presence," the King's companion smirked. The King himself seemed ready to go wherever his Oracle would point him to. Aladdin's fingers found my hand clenching one of the armrests and they were shaking in a badly concealed tremor. I wondered how much willpower it costed him not to cry.

Even brother Koumei and the rest of the Royal family crunched their eyebrows and put down their feather fans. It barely mattered that none of them thought me as worthy of the throne or a chamber in the Palace or a place under the Sun. I was the chosen one, and in the moment of coronation, Magi was more than a God and the insult to me was the insult to him.

I was glad. His gaze tore off me and it felt like I could breathe again after centuries of suffocating.

The door from the Emperor's quarters opened with a loud screech. I forgot about the hourglass that counted time until the hour fated by stars with grains of sand. I forgot about the crown that needed to be removed from the corpse's head and put onto mine.

I forgot about the scent of mirth and musk and peony water and how they weren't enough to mask a smell of decomposing tissues.

The great Magi of Sindria turned and covered his nose and mouth with a palm and I had barely seen anything less godlike in my life. I knew that the moment his eyes would land on me – on my hair, on my face, on my body just like I followed them to do before – I would be petrified again.

But as the hearse was taken into the Throne room, laid under my feet and open eyes of the late ruler stared up to the ebony ceiling, I thought for a fickle moment that we were both the same way. Frangibly, painfully, irrevocably human.

I became the Empress of the world's biggest empire veiled in pungent smell of rotten flesh and stale pus leaking out of my father's corpse.

* * *

The peach tree had grown for so long that his roots had embedded into the core of Earth. His crown was so high that you could have touched the stars from the highest of his branches.

My nanny told me a story about a boy who had tried to climb it. His mother had died before he was born, and so he bethought that she had turned into one of stars. He wanted to feel her touch once for last, and so he climbed and climbed and ate peaches and threw their pits down and then climbed again. But when he was just a few branches from the star he wanted to reach, he started to feel sick from all the peaches he ate. He slipped and fell down and broke his head on all the peach pits lying on the ground under the tree.

I protested that was not how stories were supposed to end. That he was either to meet his mother and fall asleep in her embrace, or touch the star only to find out that stars are mere clouds of cold dust that died millions of years ago. Brother Koumei said so.

But the nanny just proclaimed that I shouldn't have eaten that many peaches and climbed the tree and thrown pits under the peach tree, because just the other day cousin Hakuryuu had gone on a walk and stumbled over one and his wailings had awoken the Emperor.

I decided to ask Emperor about the real ending of the boy's story. Emperor knew everything and maybe he would have known if one of the stars might have been my I was never allowed near Emperor, and when I was, I was too old to ask.

„I know how the story ends."

Aladdin's feet were cold under my sheet, sending a wave of shivers up my legs. His hair carried scent of night air and smoke from palace hearths burning all night and day for the dying ruler.

His face was buried between my shoulder blades and I felt strong, big and strong and ready to protect him from anything that wanted to hurt him.

„Your nanny lied," he said, his voice muffled by folds of my silken nightgown.

„I figured," I said proudly. It was rare for me not to trust nanny. Brother Kouen would praise me, had he not been preoccupied by standing by his father's trembling body and chanting prayers into stale pungent air.

He nodded, the tip of his nose moving along my spine.

„But it's just a story. It can end any way we like."

He breathed out with something akin to whimper. His breath felt hot on my skin under the gown, like a bruise that spreads over the porcelain of my skin for days to last.

„That's what we have stories for," I continued, because I did not want to see him cry and did not understand what he would have cried for. And my belief in changing the course of destiny through stories was as firm as my belief in anything I've been told to believe.

„There was a boy," he said. He wasn't crying. His hand was clutching the back of my robe, fingernails digging into my skin through the thin fabric. It happened sometimes when he came to sleep in my bed, though, and I learned not to be concerned. „A boy who climbed the tree."

„Up to the highest branches?"

„All the way up. Where the peaches are the colour of blood and taste like honeymead."

I laughed. The peaches had always been pale and sour, hard to swallow because of their thick skin and hard to gather from the maze of branches.

„And what there? What did he find beside the peaches?"

The candle on the nightstand wavered. He shifted under the sheets and his legs were getting warmer from my body heat. I was glad. It scared me how cold he had always been, as if making a company to the Emperor in his overheated chambers drained all the life from him and there was water instead of blood pulsing through his veins.

His hands circled around my waist. I felt his fingers on my belly, on my chest, before they clutched on my robe right under my chestbone.

„The boy did nothing wrong," he whispered into my shoulder. „Just missed his mother, nothing else."

His arms were suffocating me, locked around my ribs with force unheard of from a boy not yet high enough to step up inside a palanquin. I had a hard time remembering that he was not an ordinary boy the age of my crying, snotty, clumsy cousin. The sole realization that the trembling child mistaking me for his mother was the mightiest being in whole world, felt unbelievable, and thus unbearable. Sometimes I was worried that I would never be able to let him go.

Sometimes I was worried that I was turning him into a substitute of something missing, too.

„What did the boy find?" I whispered through constrained lungs.

„Nothing," he whispered back.

I kept singing him a lullaby long after he fell asleep, clinging to my back like a child whose mother had left and forgot to tell him when she would return.

* * *

He got me a wall built for a wedding gift.

Dandelions weave into a wreath easily. Just pick the stem over the soil and gird over the head of the other one. Sometimes you forget the time exists and the wreath turns into a chain. Little suns woven together bind your neck and tie your hands and feet. They leave stains, the dandelions, brown stains reminding of rot on your white palms. You can scrub them all you want, they are not going away. They stay, just like I do. Dandelions tie and imprison. The wall does, too, but the wall is blindingly white and without fault, and thus is nothing but a mere accomplice. Unlike me.

You took my hands and saw them red and raw from scrubbing under the stream from the fountain. You kissed them and I wondered how high the wall must have had been to stop you. You kissed my mouth and I wondered if he was looking from the window of his chambers. He wasn't; he always worked with his back turned to his gardens and towards his people.

I wondered why you didn't take me out of there and you said that we had nowhere else to go but where the destiny sent us. I wanted it to sound hollow and hopeless and longing. It didn't. The last thing you were longing for and was able to get was weaving wreaths behind the walls of your palace. I wondered if you were the one to build the wall, not him. I didn't want to know the truth.

I asked you once why my husband never visited me, and you laughed and kissed my forehead under the crown of autumn flowers.

I've been a Consort of Sindria for two years then.

* * *

There were stains on my hands, and they weren't from dandelions.

I was stumbling through the battlefield. The soles of my shoes, build to be worn on the marble floors of polished-smooth palaces, were torn into shreds. Blood oozing from the wounds on my feet was leaving tracks on the pebbles. I was not crying, not yet. I promised myself to cry only under clear skies, and the world was still coated in impenetrable darkness.

I cursed, instead.

I did not have a foolish expectations that my curses would move the entity that was looming over the world in a place where the sun had been. It was disturbingly easy to get accustomed to it, and even easier to look at, without the need to shield eyes to avoid being blinded. It was familiar, in a way, and by that thought I was more scared than I'd ever been in my life. You would have expected me to run away, I knew. In foolish moments of weakness I wondered whether that was the reason I fought with all my power. Then I remembered that my country – both of my countries, both countries I ruled over, with no might over either – were veiled in smoke and ashes and thick stench of blood. There was no man who could have convinced me more.

Not even the one who was betrayed.

"I didn't know you knew such words, my lady."

Sinbad was as composed as I was disheveled, his robes and armor intact and shining, as if the battles enrolling in front of our eyes weren't but a mere war games. The ones that Sindria was organizing every year on his birthday and the ones Sinbad was always winning. He couldn't handle loss and his warriors loved him too much to fight him.

"You don't know me," slipped out of my mouth before I realized that I sounded just like I did when I came to Sindria. Young, naive princess that was never fit to become more than a garden decoration. "This is not a game, Your Highness."

Sinbad tilted his head back and laughed with that ringing laugh of his. It made me think for a moment that had you not enchanted me first, perhaps I would have become a queen of Sindria with all the glory that was thought to come with being his wife. Then I remembered what you told me about him and his adviser, and was glad I saved myself a heartbreak.

"It is a game if you are one of the players, my lady," he said. I wondered if, years ago, the glint in his eyes would come to me as attractive, enticing, even seductive. I thanked the gods I wasn't believing in anymore that I was taught to look beyond the facade.

It was menacing.

"So you sacrificed your country to win a game?" I asked.

The scene felt unreal. The world was lying in dust, the voices of my brothers' mortal agony were echoing inside my ears, the corpses of my enemies were scattered on the ground, and I was having a debate with my spouse. The spouse I haven't seen since the first time we had met.

"I'm winning the game to save my country," my husband corrected me. His smirk was far from the cocky grin he presented in the day of my coronation. He didn't have an ounce of doubt about his words.

"There's not a lot to save," I pointed out.

His smile didn't waver.

"I'll rebuild it anew," he said, "in all its glory."

I didn't feel my sword leave the sheath. I didn't notice my hands moving, I didn't realize until I heard the clash of blades.

"Took you too long to notice," Sinbad spat out, his scimitar holding off my sword from cutting his skull in half. "Guess you still haven't become an Empress material."

It was a losing fight, that much was obvious. His strong arms holding the scimitar pushed me back with ease, as if I was just a young boy holding a sword for the first time. I wasn't concentrating. It was as if my arms had a mind of their own and its only goal was to hurt Sinbad. The clumsily aimed attacks were recoiling from the plates of his armor. My blade kept on missing all the uncovered places, as he moved with flexibility I thought of as unheard. He didn't even once attempt to go offensive towards me, he didn't even grace me with the honor of being considered an equal. He was waiting for me to get tired. I was tired, and frustrated, because none of the battles I'd won were won, none at all.

"How long has it been, my lord?" I asked. The clashes were becoming slower and sluggish, my arms felt heavy and my feet were like in fire, but I was not about to give up the fight. "How long since you've fallen?"

He smirked again; for a moment he looked like a wild desert fox, leading nomads away from her water source for them to die in scorching heat. A strong strike almost made me lose a hold of sword. Its blade scratched my bare shoulder. Thin stream of warm blood trickled down my arm.

"I thought he would tell you," he said and retreated, waiting for me to decide next attack. "Although I suppose you two didn't do much of talking."

I hurled on him without thinking. I don't know what notion was the one to provoke me: that he knew, all along, and agreed with the charade of marriage, or that he didn't expect me to understand what he had done. Or maybe the sole realization that he never thought of me as a person on my own at all, and that he expected you to do the same.

He barely stopped me this time. It was undeniable that without his newly acquired agility I would hurt him severely. My sword only managed to slash his cheek, like in a retaliation for my own shallow wound. I expected him to crouch, to step back, to scrutinize damage done to his handsome face.

The swarm of tiny flying insects rushed out of the wound. They were soundless and black, just like the vicious night that had befallen upon us.

He must have realized. The scimitar fell down to his feet, his arms hanging limply by his sides, my expression of utter horror reflecting in his eyes.

"I didn't want to," he whispered.

His voice was echoing through the vast emptiness. It didn't offer a reply, or a consolation. His words were sent back to him and he crouched under their weight.

He wasn't a king anymore. He was nothing but a man who gambled and lost in a game with no winning end.

"I just wanted to save my land."

And I believed him.

I believe him even now, now when there is nothing to be saved anymore. Just as well as I believed that his soul of all was strong enough to outbrave the power of the Black God, the power sent from the world that was not ours, nor made for us.

"I know," was all I said as I sheathed my sword.

I left him to stand in the foundations of what might have been the great dining hall once, shaking in realization of his own fallibllity. There was no time to deal with fallen king, when his world was crumbling under my feet.

I heard him calling for his advisor's name, but we both knew no one was coming.

* * *

You told me you wanted me to own me. That was how I knew you loved me.

You told me you craved for my fingers to be cut, because their fingertips could have never come to match yours.

You told me you wanted to carve your name into my skin, because then it would be never forgotten.

You told me you wanted to hang me on wall with nails in my palms and bow before me in worship of your own personal goddess.

You told me you desired for me to be reshaped, so I would fit into your palm. So I would be a clay under your palms and you could have veil me and nail me to the pedestal.

I found it endearing. I didn't realize until years later, worlds further, that I desired to be turned into statue, too. I did, because statues were pristine clean and flawless and sparse of everything that came with me being human. And your palms on my waist, on my hips, on my thighs, they felt like they were sculpting me into something better, something worthy, something god-like.

Sometimes you told me you wanted me to keep for yourself. I reminded you that you already owned the sheets, the chambers, the palace, the grace of one of the mightiest, and whole world.

You told me the world was not enough.

* * *

"I've chosen my Vessel."

The evening was cold. Crystals of ice were covering grass, petals of flowers born into coming winter, branches of peach tree behind the window. The edges of window shutters were covered in ice-coating, too, white lining in contrast with ebony wood that was expensive and luxurious and did nothing to stop freezing wind from entering the room.

We doubled the amount of sheets, then tripled, and even that wasn't enough. No one came to start a fire in the hearth. No one knew he was here, and no one was supposed to know. No one cared about my well-being. We both knew; it'd been that way for three years.

"It was time," I said. I didn't understand the mechanism of choosing a king well, despite his efforts to explain in the simplest way possible, so I just repeated what I had overheard from the maids under my window. "The Emperor's healers are waiting just for you."

"It wasn't easy to decide," he said, as if I was the one reprimanding him. Wave of regret washed over me, as he escaped the tangle of limbs we were lying comfortably in and moved to the other side of the bed.

"I know," I said silently with an untold apology. He didn't come back. I was starting to miss his body heat the sheets weren't able to compensate for; all my body hair stood up as violent shivers ran down my spine. "There's a lot of them to choose from. And they are all great."

"They abandoned you, all of them," he reminded defiantly. It startled me. He never mentioned anything against any member of Royal family, nor had I ever expected him to do so. He never seemed to harbor any hard feelings towards anyone, and I never though him able to hold a grudge. Not for three years, not for thing as minor and natural and expected like my repulsion from Higher Court.

I never held it against my brothers. They could have done worse then to cast me into oblivion. They could have done what common folk did with shameful girls like me.

"They were in right," I said. I took one of the sheets, folded it in half and covered him. He was shivering, too. I was almost ashamed by the need to protect him, to shield him from everything that was making his task even more difficult. It was my fault that we had to meet like this, unnoticed and hiding as if we were doing something shameful. Perhaps we were. I was told that sharing a bed with a man was a misdeed, but I had a hunch that there must have been something else to be done for the misdeed to be complete. And, after all, Alladin was no man, just a mere boy, and I was barely a woman myself, despite what my brothers whispered and the court shouted.

Alladin turned his head, so he was looking to my face. The candlelight was casting shadows on his face and he looked older, much older, much closer to the age of his mind than to the age of his body. He looked serious, as if the decision he was about to proclaim was about to change the course of destiny. It was. The responsibility on his shoulders would break anyone who would not be already resigned to the fact that fighting with destiny is futile and the result of its changes cannot be predicted. Not even by the mightiest of Magi, the King-Choosers, the Ones Born from Stars.

And to stars they are bound to return, that was how the saying went on, and I never spared a thought on its meaning.

"They have to take you back, if you are to be the Empress," he whispered.

"They don't," I whispered back.

Not even for a moment I harboured a doubt that it was one of his jokes, or foolish plans that were never to work out, because they were nothing more than his way of coping with burden bigger than he was able to bear.

"They don't have to do anything. They don't even have to obey you, if they don't want to."

It was true. Brother Koumei explained it to me during our politics lessons, back then, when my brothers didn't avoid the mere sight of me. The decision of Magi is nothing but a recommendation, tradition to be uphold, but not necessarily obeyed. Sometimes, there was a man thirsting for power enough not to be concerned with the divine intervention. The Emperor had been dying for four years already; there was bound to be such a man.

Or a woman. But woman rarely became chosen and even more rarely reached the throne. And none of them of uncertain descent, and stained early, like me.

"I'll make them," he said, and moved towards me and hugged me. It didn't sound threatening. It was simply a statement, a gentle warning, maybe a reminder that no one had yet seen why was he being called the First of Magi.

"I'll let you," I said, not knowing what I was agreeing to.

He curled up into a ball and whispered ineligible visions of future into my collar-bone and we were both happy despite the Northern wind that rattled the windows.

* * *

Sheets were soaked with sweat, but you were happy, and that made me happy too.

Your eyes were following the shadows crawling over my bedroom's ceiling. The lights were coming from the courtyard, flickering and colourful through the thin walls of paper lanterns. There was a music playing, simple tune like the ones maids used to sing under my windows in summer heat. I wondered if it was my husband, still tirelessly celebrating our glorious marriage.

"I've been having dreams," you said. You did not look at me, your pupils scrupulously following shades dancing to the rhythm of your slowly calming breath.

"Was I in any of them?" I asked. You told me you loved me the afternoon before over the wreath of daisies, and I've thought love to be more than sore loins and bloody stains on sheets and body tingling from a need, which had not been satisfied.

"Of course you were," you said. It sounded carelessly, as if you were consoling adisobedient child.

"Sometimes I think I dream of future," you continued. The song coming from the courtyard changed. Just like it had always been in early hours of morning, the musicians switched their flutes and tambourines to an oud and the merry songs of maids in work to the ones my brothers sometimes sang, years ago, when no one was near to scold them.

"There is a child, a boy, wearing robes of your people. I thought it to be my son, perhaps..."

I cursed the musicians in my mind. I did not want to remember my brothers. I did not want to remember their songs, as I had listened to them hidden in the library neighbouring their chambers, although books had barely interested me, and just when I had thought I had finally understood their songs' meaning, they stopped and I had never heard them sing again. I did not want to remember the palace, the Empire that had turned its back on me two too many times. And the most of all I did not want to bear you a son and clad him in embroidered silk. I was fourteen, and barely more than a child myself.

"...but then I saw his parents, and his mother wasn't as pretty as you, you know? Not at all."

I wanted you to hold me, but for it to be without bruised hips and drops of your sweat on my cheeks. I was sure that I wanted a wrong thing.

It was long after the weeping tunes of strings faded into your shallow breathing, when I allowed myself to fall into fitful sleep filled with grey-tinted dreams of rotting peaches, rattling windows and cold, marrow-freezing cold.

* * *

_A boy has a face made of porcelain, with eyelashes drawn with charcoal and eyes blown out of copper tainted glass. _

_His sleeves are stained with blood dripping from his fingertips. The body by his feet is still moving, heaving through lungs pierced with thousands invisible needles. The boy doesn't look. He doesn't cry. He doesn't knee to hug the dying, to put his little palms on her chest in vain attempt to stop the bleeding. He just stands and pours his entire being into standing and looking like his manufacturers forgot to put a soul in him._

_The woman has a veil and a mask and a robe wide open in front. Her breasts are white and soft and filled and she invites him _Come to me, I will be your mother_. He doesn't go. He stands, and he tries to keep standing even after he's taken by hand, them by arm, then by waist, even after he's being led away. The woman smiles and keeps smiling even when he's out of her sight and there are only corpses, with limbs twisted like legs of harvestmen and the same pale skin and the same charcoal black eyelashes and hair._

_The boy doesn't cry even later, when his body is shaken with spasms and little drops of sweat run down his cheeks and he bites his tongue until his mouth are filled with blood. He doesn't ask, either, or protest. He's dressed up into robes cut for a body much bigger than his and he walks like a doll that has just learned how to move her wooden joints. The woman still smiles. He still doesn't call her mother._

_Sometimes it seems like he wants to, but the word never passes his lips._

_That's how the boy grows up._

* * *

She was sitting on the throne, as if it was hers.

I noticed – she got the throne moved a step higher. There were still visible trails of dust on the marble where it had stood before, mirroring persistent stains from late Emperor's hearse that nobody seemed to think to cover with carpet. It was ridiculous, I thought. Greatest empire of humankind, and the throne room seemed more akin to an infirmary being hastily redecorated. The draperies embroidered with gold were folding over the throne like a protective canopy. The shadows they casted were dark and thick and bad and I felt hollow estrangement instead of intimidation and awe.

This wasn't my throne. I didn't remember a feeling of the golden dragons on these armrests carving into my palms. I had no recollection of golden upholstery of the back rest to shine so coldly in the shadow of my back. I sat there just a week ago, but it felt like long time passed, and I didn't recognize the hall at all.

I should have known by then.

"My lady," I said.

I bowed, although I should have been bowed to. Her scrutinizing gaze was enough to make me bend my back, even if I didn't have the urge to lower my eyes in front of the royal family. From the corner of my eye I saw Aladdin, his face betraying distress and confusion, because there was no place for him by the throne anymore.

She didn't reply. She was just sitting still, unmoving on my throne and I felt the gush of wind, the very same one that rattled my windows back then, when the winters had lasted longer than whole human's life. Silken undergarments soaked with sweat were scraping my arched spine and it felt just like back then, as if my life didn't belong to me, as if I stole it and the robbed one was waiting behind my window shutters to claim it back.

From the corner of my eye I saw Aladdin bow, too.

_I'm sorry_, I heard him say, but it might have been just the rustle of curtains.

"Kougyoku," she said. It echoed in the empty hall, reflecting from the golden walls like an image in mirror, and I never heard my name to be pronounced with such a terrifying grandeur.

"Princess Kougyoku," she repeated and smirked and only then I understood that she was mocking me. Not just by denying me the title; by everything that was surrounding me that I didn't even have time to realize. I was watching her throw her arm clad in ground-long embroidered sleeve unfit for mourning wife over the armrest and tilt her head in pretended weariness. A wave of humiliation washed over me. I thought there was nothing more humiliating than having your blood-soaked bedsheet waved in front of whole court. I was proved wrong once more.

My eyes searched for Aladdin in ask for help. His face was still facing the marble tiles. His hands were shaking from rage, but there was no one to tell me what to do now and I had no thought to spare for him.

"Two hours ago," she said casually, her ring finger slowly tracing the scales of golden dragon, "you got wed by proxy to the King of Sindria."

I heard Aladdin sob, somewhere halfway between anger and frustration. His hands were clenched in fists, knuckles white, skin translucent on his childish fingers. He looked like nothing but a child throwing tantrum in front of his mother.

_But I was to become an Empress_, I almost said. _I was chosen by the Son of Stars_.

Her smirk widened, as if she was able to read my thoughts. Maybe she was.

"You are expected to leave your quarters by sunset," she said and sounded more like an Empress giving orders than I ever could have. Her ring finger slipped into golden dragon's open jaws and it was obscene as much as terrifying. Warning, I read in her gestures, _leave or I'll devour you, throw you to beasts._ "No escort allowed," she added and unabashedly looked at the Magi that wallowed in the pit of his own powerlessness.

I didn't say anything. In my last poor act of defiance, I straightened my back without being allowed to and turned to leave the hall.

"His Magi," I heard her say in explanation I never demanded, more in order to finish Aladdin's humiliation on top of mine, because it was never about me at all, "he has taken a special liking to you."

I didn't understand the implication, but her voice sounded so ominous I carried it in my head all the way to my new home.

* * *

_A girl keeps on hiding under a table._

_For days, weeks, months. She doesn't leave her shelter. She doesn't talk. She doesn't stretch. She doesn't bath, and the layer of sweat and dust on her skin is the colour of shadows surrounding her. She eats when someone brings her food, but that happens rarely, and even then she shoves it hurriedly into her mouth with fingers. There are peach trees blooming behind her window. She doesn't see them._

_The man has unpleasant face and unpleasant voice. She cannot recognize either. He calls her princess and gives her golden hairpin. She likes how rubies glisten in the light coming from the gaps in window shutters. He tells her father is an emperor's brother, her brothers are noble as the white marble that lines the halls of the palace. She is to become twice as such, if she keeps him as her assistant. He never mentions her mother. She never asks. Maybe it's because she's forgotten how to use her voice._

_Her brothers really are akin to marble. Majestic and pale, cold and not caring about her. She is introduced and they tell her that in few years, she will get married off to some far-away land. Not to the first prince, maybe third or fourth. She asks her assistant why and he tells her. His eyes are sharp as icicles and she bends her back, as if she felt the need to apologize for her very existence. He figures it was wrong thing to do. Next day, he tells her to forget it all, and buys her robes from the finest silk and laces, velvet ribbons and flower pins that look like peach flowers, and the day after, too, until the table has to be carried out of her chambers to make room for wardrobes. She doesn't ask anymore._

_She figures talking to her imaginary friends amidst the soft clothes in the wardrobe is more comfortable anyway._

_That's how the girl grows up._

* * *

„I've been having dreams."

I was not looking at you. Straightening my undergarments, my fingers in smooth, deliberate movements throwing spider-like shadows on my neck, on my breasts, on my waist. My eyes were following them and I naturally assumed yours did, too.

I knew about the dreams. You had told me before and I was clinging to every word like a prayer to a particularly unreliable god.

„Maybe you should stop drinking with my husband," I cut your words forming into next sentence. The late night talks about your dreams were always the same. Ominous, repetitive and annoyingly mysterious, because you always refused to tell me what they meant. I stood up to tie my robe, because the chilly air coming through the curtains was making me shiver and I hoped to tie your words, too.

You didn't laugh.

Your hand sprung and clutched to the fabric of my nightgown. It felt strangely familiar. The ghosts of knuckles touching yet untainted skin of my back, fingertips leaving pink-tainted traces that were not to disappear until next morning. Another fingers, another time; your hand reached for the hem of my dress.

I halted tying a knot on my belt.

You weren't Aladdin.

„There is rukh," you said. I remembered, the golden butterflies that only Aladdin saw and gave them a name. I thought them to be a child's play, just like my friends made of shadows and loneliness. "And it is black and it tastes of bile."

„You can't taste in a dream," I said. I did not know you like this and I didn't like it, just like I was conditioned to not like anything I couldn't understand. And I needed to move to my chambers before some servant noticed my empty bed and started gossip that had been started years ago. I wanted to hit your hand off to let me go. „You just ate too much for dinner."

You did not say anything. I hoped the conversation was over. The dreams of Magi were rarely whimsical illusions of midnight sleep and never brought good things to their loved ones. I knew.

„I was _happy_, Kougyoku."

I tried to shut your voice off. I remember; I was untying and tying back the simple knot, immersed in the meticulous work of my finger joints.

„I was so happy like I've never been. And there were you. And your brothers, and your cousins by my feet, and my hands were stained with your blood and the blood was still warm, and dripping from my hands.

And I was laughing, you know? Laughing."

I let your hand clutch the silk in desperate, spasmodic hold. The dream wasn't any more of premonition than Aladdin's calling for his mother to hold him in the darkness in the hours when night was meeting the morning. We both knew you would have never hurt me. We both knew that it would have been like tearing a head off a favourite doll, or sticking a branch to an eye of a household cat. You weren't the one for hurting by drawing blood, unlike your King's generals. Not when there were measures much more discreet and much more amusing.

I didn't know you that well back then, though. Back then, I was content with the sole thought that the man I chose to lay with was not the one to stain his hands with blood. I was mistaken in too many ways to count.

„I've seen it yesterday," you said before I could say some empty words of consolation, „the Fallen."

Your face was pale, almost translucent in the flickering light of almost finished candles. Just like my fingers; tying and untying, tying and untying, in a frantic rhythm that attempted to take all my attention. It didn't matter that I wasn't able to understand the meaning of your words. They alone were scary, just like the words are able to be sometimes.

I desperately wanted not to look at you. I desperately wanted to run away, and lift my fingers and tangle them in front of my eyes, so that I would never see you anymore. I wanted you to stay like you were, flawless and mighty and unchanging, like a dragon carved into a column of the Throne Hall.

I knew where you had just returned from.

And you said his name with a face twisted with unimaginable fear. And I wanted the knot to break, because I needed a proof that everything would have gone according to old stories' rules. Back then, I trusted old stories, and I trusted you too much to question your words.

The knot stayed the way it was.

* * *

A wooden doll was rolling on the ground, face painted with thick strokes grinning at me in victorious mockery.

I could count them, lying on the scorched soil blackened from the fires no one had seen being casted. One for every man with fingers pale and twisted from rheum like branches of drying birch, reaching to touch a strand of my hair with evil grin, only to turn into needles. I could have counted the stones still standing, and my thoughs pondering how can destruction come so quietly, like a cat moving around a familiar garden. I could count my thoughts, all of them. My mind was clouded by the very same haze of sand and dust that was stinging and blinding my eyes, settling on my eyelashes and barring me from seeing anything past two or three steps, where the needle men were waiting for me to stumble. I was trapped in the loop of rubbles and dust, drops of blood on my skin and rust on my sword.

You were nowhere in sight.

No one else was, but that was expected. According to a plan, the one told over the table with map that had ceased to be correct the moment the rest of the world had fallen to darkness. I could still hear the screams of my family ringing in my ears, as if I had heard them – low grunt of unwavering Kouen, terrified shrieking of Koumei calculating tactics for long defeated armies hiding under the stone bridge, abruptly cut off laughter of Kouha, defiant cries of Hakuei fiercely guarding her unborn child. I never caught Aladdin's voice. It didn't matter; maybe Magi didn't die, or they turned into sea-foam, or into stars. Maybe his voice was saved for the last, for the moments when my denial about our loss would crumble like a molded bread Koumei used to feed his pigeons with. Maybe I just didn't want to hear it.

There was a rattle of metal by my feet and I realized my sword fell out of my hand. I was tired, tired of the meaningless task and the responsibility I'd granted upon myself, even though no one invited me to take it. I seemed to get things only after I took them without asking.

I bent to lift my weapon, when the corner of my eye caught a coming figures. The thick stitches on the leather handle of my sword cut into my palms. I was not about to give up this time. I assumed the posture and ignored the stinging in my shoulders. I was not about to let him attack first.

The needle man wasn't alone.

Her scepter was long, thin and made of silver and onyx, sparkling in the world with no sunlight, and its sharp tip was with carefully calculated distance just barely scraping the skin of my lower back. I knew my body well; one move and it would pierce the artery near my kidney.

"You seem to have a thing for fighting losing fights," she said. Her tone was casual, her words carefully measured. Her entrance grand; the Empress of the Fallen Empire did nothing to conceal her overbearing presence.

"I've started to choose my own fights," I more breathed out than said through my teeth. They rattled from shivers cold metal was sending down my spine. I wondered if she was able to read my memories and understand the significance. Of course she was; I wondered how could I have ever not doubted her humanity.

"Have you?"

There was not a grain of interest in her voice, as if I was nothing but a pebble on the road, threatening to get stuck in her lacquered shoe.

I did not want to fight her. I wanted to make her tell me whether Aladdin was still alive and then, regardless on the answer, find the remains of my chambers, lie on the scorched frame of my bed and sleep there until the end of time, dreaming of peach boys born from my womb with stars on their foreheads. I wanted to throw the sword away to get devoured by rust and decay. I wanted to find the map of the world and blacken all the countries that had turned into ash and blacken Sindria, too, for it has fallen long time before I started struggling. I wanted to tear my clothes off and start dancing, because there was no one to stop me and no one who would care to.

Choices rarely come easily. It took me only seventeen years and one world's end to find out.

I turned and with motion unexpectedly swift the blade of my sword clashed with her scepter.

I should have known better.

The needle grazed my lower ribs. If I hadn't moved, it would pierce into my spinal cord or lung and there would be no tale to tell anymore. If I had known back then, I would panick and run away. I didn't; the stinging and numbness caused by the poison were quickly spreading through my torso, but I was convincing myself that I could manage.

"Empress no more, now you turned into a martyr?"

She was taunting me. I recognized that much even through the haze of exhaustion and all of my focus on the wrists heaving the weapon. Her tone, her demeanor was the same as in the throne room, years ago, when I was taught the final lesson of the price my life had had. I had an urge to vomit and I had an urge to cry like Aladdin never did.

I refused to do any of that now.

My attack was clumsy, aiming for her chest not covered by thick padded belt around her waist. It should have been easy. Her height was unimpressive, now that I wasn't seeing her perched from high above, barely reaching my own. My training with arms was reduced into few haste lectures by my generals in the royal cellar among the apple and rice barrels, but she was the Royal Consort and I had been taught that their womb was the noble woman's only weapon. Her scepter promptly and effortlessly blocked my sword and let the blade slide off to the side so abruptly I barely kept my balance not to stumble into the dust. Sharp pain stang in my ankle as it twisted on a stray piece of debris and I remembered that I was also taught that women didn't curse and read from military maps and sneak off to other man's chambers every other night. Teaching me how to use sword would be less of a waste of time.

"He's not coming back to you, you know."

The left side of my body was tingling. I wondered how close to her I could have gotten before the poison would seep into my veins and prevent my stiff fingers from holding a sword.

"Yes," I said, because I started wondering whether it mattered and whether it was worth it and the answer to both was no.

"I showed him another world," she continued. She wasn't even moving her scepter anymore, just standing still like heavy clouds before storm. I should have been afraid. My ankle was hurting and I was struggling with breathing and both seemed to be of more immediate concern.

"The one he deserves. The one he was craving for before he even knew what he was missing. I showed them both, and you lost them, both of them."

I turned on my healthy foot in a clumsy pirouette and lunched again. I managed to make a tear in her robe. She didn't move an inch, neither did her scepter, and I remembered the gossip the maids had been spouting under my windows, about the Queen keeping her skin wrinkless and her husbands mightless, about her, naked, holding her scepter, standing on the roof through the stormy nights. The witch, they called her. I thought they just envied her beauty and pride and power.

"I don't care," I said, and the startling realization that it was true fell upon me with all its weight. I wasn't fighting her to see him, to save him from anything I wanted to save him before. I wasn't even fighting to save the world for us, because that would be just futile and foolish. I wasn't the one both of the boys from under the peach trees were looking for, and that was fine, and that was how it should have been. I was fighting her because I wanted to.

The needle man said something I didn't understand and her lips twisted in discontent. Her forehead creased and her youthful face wasn't a pristine cast of perfection anymore. Her eyes were looking somewhere in the distance beyond me and they scared me, more then anything I had seen and heard and guessed, I wanted to flee, but there was nowhere to, because everywhere I looked there was her, and her eyes were empty in a way both similar and painfully different from both yours and Aladdins.

She held up her scepter and I wanted to stop her, even though I had no idea what was the course of her action. But my limbs were lead and my veins full of liquid ice, and my chest felt constricted, as if suddenly circled tightly by a pair of hands too tiny to carry the weight of the world.

The orb of void devoured us and the rest of the world.

I felt the weight of a crown on my head, not the one I was never crowned with, but the one I was chosen to carry. It felt light, lighter than I expected it to, like a child's toy forgotten inside a pile of wooden swords and dried elderberries and memories of breathing. There was nothing to rule over anymore, but the rumbles and dreams of fickle sleep and it felt like it was meant to be.

Sometimes little peach boys and girls are allowed to touch the stars.

* * *

I was nine when I got my first period.

I was also nine when I was told that my mother, the one I barely remembered sparse a voice singing me a lullaby, was a prostitute, filthy and immoral and with no motherly love for me, for she gave me away to Palace first thing when my red hair started rashing out of my forehead.

I was nine when I was informed that I would end up like her, because all I got from the Emperor was the colour of my hair and education I would never need and golden hairpins I was to return back, but my body and thus also my mind are all hers.

Nine is not a proper age for any of those things.

* * *

He had a face of an old man, the clothes of a beggar and the eyes of a man who had lost the world in a game of dice.

And you shouted, gods, how you shouted.

_I'm sorry_, the man kept saying, over and over, until his voice went raspy and he could speak no more, and even then he kept mouthing the words soundlessly. His hair was unkept and matted with mud and his bare chest covered in badly inflamed bruises and I knew him, I saw the man before.

You were hovering over him as he was crouching on the marble tiles, soiling their pristine gloss with his dirty soles. And you never stopped shouting.

I should have been afraid. Of you. Of the news the man carried with him. Of the darkness that had eaten the sun and the light and all the gods. But the man had lice on his eyelashes and I could see them even from afar, they wandered through his eyelids and eyeballs and tears were streaming down his cheeks and at first you though they were the tears of shame.

_It wouldn't have happened to me_, you said. I wanted to halt you, wanted to remind you that it already did, that you let it happened. I didn't. I let out a strangled laugh instead, and the man's eyes turned to me. I thought they must had been soft and caring before all that caused him to come here for his redemption. They reminded me of Aladdin, but all the eyes had been reminding me of him for years.

_I would have stopped them, _you said, and the corners of the man's mouth twisted bitterly. His gaze was turned to me, as if your presence was nothing but a mere nuisance. His lips formed a word, but it was soundless and I didn't understand it. I wondered if he wanted to tell me you were wrong. I found out by myself; the uncertainty was seeped into your posture, into your voice, into the way your fingers moved as if they were tying and untying invisible knot.

_We are the Magi, Yunan, _you said, _we are the mightiest beings in this world. Everything is possible for us._

Yunan's eyes were looking at the spasms of your fingers. The lice were slowly moving across his eyelashes, blissfully unaware of the destiny of the world they had been born into. It wasn't destiny that was being decided at that moment, in that room; merely whether you would be strong enough to fight it.

I remembered my wedding, the one I never took part in, and knew the answer.

I'd never seen you crumble. Not like that; the nights you had woken from a dream that might have been present or past or another world you were shaking and breaking with sweat and blind through eyes hazed with another sight. When you were telling me about the black rukh you were distant and afraid, but calm in the false attempt to prove yourself wrong. Not now.

You looked as if the world ended right then and there, in front of your eyes. And it did, I think it did.

Yunan didn't bat an eyelash as you ran out of the room. He knew. He could have disappeared without warning, he could have said that there was still hope, he could have done anything to save the Judal I knew, the one that thought the world was lying by his feet in dust kneeling for redemption, just like Yunan had done. I looked at him still sitting on the cold floor and saw him smirking.

_Come here, Empress, _he didn't say but could have, for I heard his voice much clearly than in those muttered apologies before. _I will give you a gift._

_I'm not the Empress_, I wanted to say. I didn't; the Magi were the mightiest , but the one who stayed was me. The title was the least I deserved.

I saw him smile, with the same gentle smile as he wore in my dreams.

As I was leaving the room to call warriors of my kingdom for the last call, I thought I saw him veiled in the myriads of golden butterflies.

* * *

_A girl and a boy bite from a peach._

_It's ripe and plump and juices stream down their fingers, their wrists, their lips._

_Together, in perfect synchronicity._

_The stars shine bright through the branches, but there is no one to look at them._

* * *

She was naked, her breasts sagging from numerous breastfeedings hanging from her chest, their nipples perked in the same terrifying excitement that twisted her features into hideous mask, and he was clinging to them as a newborn child.

_I'll burn this world into a crisp_, she said, but there was no voice coming from her dark gaping hole of a mouth.

The stretch marks on her belly were rippling like snakes, maze of green-tinted veins and capillaries as thin as silken threads was showing through tender skin. It reminded me of streams and rills, gathering into river and disappearing into the forlorn depths of her womb and I though, oh, Great Mother. The one who bears life and thus she is given the right to take it.

I think I kneeled in worship. I think I bowed as deep as the scorched soil allowed me to. I think that for a moment, I saw her how she was always supposed to be seen, and I think I liked it.

Your steps scraped the rubbles.

I recognized the ruins. It was the concrete wall around the palace garden, the one where only King's consort, her maids and her arrogant, obstinate, conceited lover were allowed entrance. The flowers and the wreaths and kisses behind azaleas that everyone could have seen from the balconies of Southern Wing.

_I was an empress once_, I remembered, _I am the Empress now. I bow to no one._

You passed my arched back without halting, without recognition, without hesitation in your steps. I figured. It was you no more, your eyes were blinded with clotted blood and the muscles of your calves were tense, as if it wasn't them making you move, but strings of a puppeteer of sorts. The swarm of tar black flies was surrounding your head, tangling into your disheveled hair and tainting your porcelain white skin and I realized that they weren't flies at all. I wanted to feel betrayed, or empty, or angry at last. I would feel all right with all of them.

_Welcome, my child,_ she said and opened her arms.

Her rukh flew and joined yours and it was chanting her invitation thousandfolds, in thousands and thousands different voices and all of them sounded like the voice of mother. There must have been the voice of mine. Your hands were trembling in violent tremor. Joints of your fingers were straightening painfully, as they were counting all the mothers from all the lives you had ever lived. All the mothers you were never destined to cling to, to run to and lay your head on their chest.

And I've forgiven you. Not for what you've done to me. For what destinies have done to you.

I looked at Aladdin, holding on to her pulsing skin like an anchor, and wondered whether there was a world where both of you were allowed to be born and grow into life of love and warmth and light. I couldn't imagine it, but then she called you again and he called her Mother Sheba and my only thought was that he looked as happy as I'd never seen him before.

And you answered.

* * *

My mother once told me a story.

Or it might not have been my mother at all. The figures in my past merge into shapeless, faceless, nameless beings with the smell of peach skin and musk.

There are stars up in the sky. The ones you can see from the top branches of trees in Royal garden, the ones that lead your way when you get lost in the vast desert, the ones you can wish upon if you have something to wish for. The ones that have destiny, yours and mine and the destinies of all the people and beings that had ever rummaged through the same world, written into their constellations.

They are not alone.

There are beings, matterless, faceless, celestial beings, whose ethereal bodies sprawl through whole universe. And they hold sceptres and with them, the stars are forced to move according to their will. A grand game, amusing in its own meaninglessness. And that's how the destinies are shaped, and that's why humans cannot foresee even a minute forward, even a second towards their inevitable end.

Those beings, they don't care about humans. They know about us. They just don't care.

I told you the story once, but it was before, when you never listened. And now, it doesn't matter anymore.

They are called Djinns, but my mother called them Shepherds of Stars.


End file.
